WASHINGTON — Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. delayed making a decision about a potential presidential campaign for months, in part because of the tears of his 11-year-old granddaughter. That time for family healing after the death of her father, the vice president’s son Beau, in May ultimately meant he would not be able to win, Mr. Biden said.

Mr. Biden recalled a moment by the family swimming pool this summer when his granddaughter Natalie was sitting on his lap. She “turns around and puts her arms around me and starts sobbing and says: ‘Pop, I see Daddy all the time. I see Daddy all the time. Pop, you smell like Daddy. You’re not going to leave me, are you, Pop?’ “ Mr. Biden said in an interview televised on Sunday night on CBS’s “60 Minutes.”

Mr. Biden suggested that just a week ago Natalie was in a better place emotionally, and he described how she had finished a cross-country running race and said: “Daddy would be happy, wouldn’t he? Wouldn’t he?” Beau Biden, 46, died on May 30 of a cancerous brain tumor.

“It just takes time,” Mr. Biden said to the interviewer, Norah O’Donnell. “And until you get there, you know, it’s not — not an appropriate thing to throw your — and by the way, you can’t run for president unless you throw your entire being into it.”

Mr. Biden acknowledged that the delay in making his decision meant that he could not win a presidential contest.

“If I thought we could’ve put together the campaign that our supporters deserve and our contributors deserved, I would have gone ahead and done it,” he said.

Mr. Biden said his wife, Jill Biden, was pressing him to run, mentioning such issues as potential Supreme Court nominations and attention to education issues to spur him on. But speculation in the news media, often inaccurate, about his intentions “was driving us crazy,” he said.

“I’d get up some mornings,” he continued, “and say: ‘Let’s just end this thing, man. We don’t have time to, I don’t want to go keep getting buffeted like this.’ “

Mr. Biden also discussed news reports about conversations he had with his dying son about whether to mount a campaign. While Beau had “all along” urged him to seek the presidency, Mr. Biden said, there was nothing that could be characterized as a death-bed request to run.

“There was not what was sort of made out as kind of this Hollywood-esque thing that at the last minute Beau grabbed my hand and said, ‘Dad, you’ve got to run, like, win one for the Gipper,’ ” he said. “It wasn’t anything like that.”

Mr. Biden said he now had no intention of running for office again. He also said his comment last week that Republicans were not “my chief enemy” was not intended as a subtle criticism of Hillary Rodham Clinton, who had listed Republicans as among her enemies in answer to a debate question.

He insisted that he and Mrs. Clinton “get along together” and that he liked her.

“The only reason to run is because I still think I could do a better job than anybody else could do,” Mr. Biden said. “That’s the reason to run. I wouldn’t run against Hillary.”

Correction:Oct. 27, 2015

Because of an editing error, an article on Monday about Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s decision not to enter the 2016 presidential race misstated, in some editions, how he described a comment he made last week, in which he said Republicans were not “my chief enemy.” Mr. Biden said the comment was not intended as a criticism of Hillary Rodham Clinton; he did not say he intended to criticize her.

A version of this article appears in print on , Section A, Page 11 of the New York edition with the headline: Biden’s Family Held Sway In Decision to Forgo a Bid . Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe